India Is Constructing a Mega-river

This text initially appeared in Hakai Journal.

In India, extreme water shortages in a single a part of the nation usually coincide with acute flooding in one other. When these twin tragedies happen, Indians are sometimes left wishing for a technique to steadiness out the inequities—to show one area’s extra right into a salve for the opposite.

Quickly, they could get their want.

India is about to launch an enormous engineering mission—greater than 100 years within the making—that may join a number of of the subcontinent’s rivers, reworking the disparate flows of neighboring watersheds right into a mega–water grid spanning from the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal.

Absolutely realized, the Nationwide River Linking Undertaking will see India’s Nationwide Water Growth Company dig 30 hyperlinks that may switch an estimated  7 trillion cubic ft of water across the nation annually. The purpose is to assist irrigate tens of hundreds of thousands of hectares of farmland and bolster India’s hydroelectric-power era. With an estimated price ticket of $168 billion, the mission is “distinctive in its unrivalled grandiosity,” consultants say.

Comparable—although much less bold—water transfers occur in different elements of the world. China’s South-to-North Water Diversion Undertaking will finally carry trillions of cubic ft of water annually throughout greater than 600 miles. And in Sri Lanka, the place water is diverted from the Mahaweli Ganga river basin, folks have benefited from improved meals safety and better incomes, says Upali Amarasinghe, an information scientist with the Worldwide Water Administration Institute in Sri Lanka. India’s river-linking mission may have some monetary advantages, Amarasinghe says, however his calculations counsel they may come at the price of displacing folks and submerging giant tracts of land.

The mission is already underneath manner. India’s authorities has “accorded it prime precedence,” says Bhopal Singh, director common of India’s water company. The federal government has obtained clearances for the primary hyperlink within the grid—connecting the Ken and Betwa Rivers, in central India—and Singh says the contract for its development will seemingly be awarded quickly.

Scientists and water-policy consultants, nonetheless, have doubts concerning the scheme’s scientific footing. They fear that the federal government hasn’t adequately accounted for the potential unintended penalties of shifting such a lot of water. Working example: New analysis means that the river-linking mission threatens to have an effect on India’s monsoon season.

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1 / 4 of the rain that elements of India obtain through the annual monsoon comes from so-called recycled precipitation—water that evaporates from the land in a single place and falls someplace else as rain. Diverting giant quantities of water may intervene with that pure course of, says Tejasvi Chauhan, a water engineer and biosphere modeler at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry and the lead creator of the brand new paper analyzing the river-linking mission’s potential impact on India’s monsoon. The examine reveals that the mission may truly exacerbate water stress by inflicting the quantity of rain falling in September in some dry areas to drop by as much as 12 p.c whereas rising rainfall elsewhere.

The “preliminary assumption,” Chauhan advised me, “is that river basins are unbiased programs and output from one … can be utilized to feed the opposite.” However they exist as elements of a hydrological system. “Modifications in a single can result in modifications in one other,” he mentioned.

To additional complicate the mission’s worth, analysis reveals that rainfall has decreased over Indian river basins at the moment thought to comprise a surplus of water.

Though at the moment’s incarnation of India’s river-linking mission is rooted in plans made in 1980, the thought dates to the nineteenth century, when the British irrigation engineer Arthur Thomas Cotton proposed linking southern India’s main rivers to enhance irrigation and make it simpler and cheaper to maneuver items. An identical proposal within the Nineteen Seventies pitched linking two of India’s largest rivers, the Ganga and Kaveri, whereas one other proposal generally known as the Garland Canal envisaged connecting rivers within the north to these within the south.

Political assist for the river-linking mission wavered over time, however in 2012, India’s supreme court docket ordered the federal government to get to work. The mission, nonetheless, remained on the again burner till 2014, when the water minister mentioned it was a dream mission of the newly sworn-in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s authorities, and might be achieved inside a decade.

Beset by delays, development of the primary 137-mile hyperlink—the Ken-Betwa connection—is predicted to take a number of years. Himanshu Thakkar, a coordinator with the Indian NGO South Asia Community on Dams, Rivers, and Folks, finds solace within the mission’s gradual tempo.

Thakkar is anxious concerning the river-linking mission—most notably its lack of transparency. Thakkar was a part of a supreme-court-appointed committee on river linking however says he was not allowed to assessment the hydrological knowledge behind the plan’s logic of defining sure watersheds as surplus basins and others as websites with water deficits.

The information are “a state secret” and have “not been peer-reviewed in any credible manner,” Thakkar says. “We have to take democratic and knowledgeable selections—that’s not taking place.”

Past doubtlessly disrupting the distribution of rainfall throughout India, the preliminary hyperlink of the mission is predicted to submerge giant areas of a vital tiger reserve and kill about 2 million bushes. Thakkar says the mission may additionally damage populations of gharial (a household of fish-eating crocodiles), vultures, and several other different species.

Singh, from India’s water company, says the federal government is conducting an in depth environmental-impact evaluation for each proposed hyperlink, with the intention of preserving ecosystems. He says the primary problem to the mission’s rollout is politics—getting Indian states to reach at a consensus on how the water can be shared. Singh is optimistic that the mission will assist remedy India’s water crises “to a big extent.”

However with development nonetheless largely within the blueprint stage, Amarasinghe and different water-management consultants are urging the federal government to think about different measures—comparable to rainwater harvesting, groundwater recharge, and crop diversification—to deal with water-related points in methods which are each much less bold and cheaper.

After greater than 100 years, India’s grand imaginative and prescient to reengineer its waterways is inching towards fruition. The query, Thakkar says, is: “Do we want it?”